Pre-pandemic I lived in the city, had a badly paying job in the arts, sublet an attic and spent my time faffing about doing fun stuff with my gorgeous friends. But I never had much money, my mental health was a bit squiffy (lots of highs and lows) and my romantic relationships always ended in disaster.
So post-pandemic I moved away, got a well paying job, a nice boyfriend who wants to settle down and have children and I don’t have the highs and lows any more.
But I find myself, at 34, torn between wanting what everyone else has (the kids and house) and being incredibly bored and desperately wanting to run away. Perhaps to move again to a new part of the world.
Should I pack it all in and move or just let my life roll out into babies and houses? Can you live with both ideas concurrently? How long should I sit with boredom before doing something new?
Eleanor says: On the well lit stage of imagination, there’s always the version of your life where you’ve made slightly different choices: a bit more glamorous, a bit more exciting, a bit more fulfilling.
That fictional could-have-been life can lure us into making two separate mistakes. One, we don’t notice what’s beautiful in the version we’re living, because it’s been dulled by familiarity. And two, more seriously, we risk throwing away a good reality to chase after an alluring fantasy.
It’s especially easy to feel the allure of the could-have-been at your stage of life. This is a point of transition between a period in which possibilities feel endless and open, to a time when we make choices that exclude some of them.
It’s natural to feel a pang of sadness when we start down one path, simply because we’re no longer surveying all the things we could choose. That doesn’t mean the path we chose is a bad one – there’s just a sense of loss when the future is no longer totally open.
The trick is figuring out which kind of dissatisfaction you’re experiencing. Is it an actual, bona fide, rap-your-knuckles-on-it preference for things to be different? If so, that’s worth listening to.
Or is it this more faceless, inevitable restlessness that comes with being finite creatures who have to close doors?
It’s so hard to tell, from the inside!
Being “incredibly bored” sounds bad. And if all you’re getting in exchange is what “everyone else has”, that’s not a good trade. You’d have to be totally committed to the value of the babies-and-houses life for it to be worth buying it with eternal boredom.
But one thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to make every choice at once. The categories presented to us culturally – “kids and house” v “travel and freedom” – aren’t as starkly opposed as they seem. You can have a family without living in suburbia, you can be creatively stimulated without life being tumultuous. Your options aren’t polarised between Bohemia and Stepford.
Starting with small changes may help you discover the kind of boredom you’re experiencing. What would make you feel invigorated and stimulated again? Do a bit of it! Make something, stage something, take a trip back to the city, pepper your life with more of what feels exciting.
When you have 20% more of it, how do you feel? Has the itch been scratched, or does it remind you what you miss? Making changes slowly allows time for the sheen of those changes to rub off, if it’s going to. It makes it less likely you’ll throw in what turned out to be a worthwhile towel.
The test, in weighing versions of your life, isn’t how they measure up to your imagination or others’ expectations. What eases the inevitable closing of possibility is when your choices make you feel more like the person you want to be.
This question has been edited for length and clarity.
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